Title

Rhetoric and Collective Necessity: The Declaration of Independence

Authors

Patrick Belanger, California State University, Monterey BayFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2016

Publication Title

Rhetor

Abstract

This essay examines how the U.S. Declaration of Independence justified revolution in the midst of a volatile set of political exigencies. To engage and conciliate those colonists who held fragile or ambivalent attitudes toward the idea of independence, this short document strove to construct a narrative that vindicated mass political upheaval and laid an explanatory groundwork for the efforts to come. The Declaration is more than a starting point; it was negotiated within history at a specific juncture, and informed by the intellectual climate of the 18th century. I argue that its pivotal strategy marshals a Deist conception of Reason equated with transcendent Natural Law. The result is a rhetorically constructed narrative of resigned inevitability.

Comments

Published in Rhetor, Vol. 6, 2016, pp. 84-98, by the Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric.

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Recommended Citation

Belanger, Patrick, "Rhetoric and Collective Necessity: The Declaration of Independence" (2016). HCOM Faculty Publications and Presentations. 5.
https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/hcom_fac/5